


At the Turning of the Year

by maplemood



Series: To Everything There is a Season [1]
Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Babies, Childbirth, F/M, Marriage, Mythology References, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-14 16:16:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18479812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: “That’s right.” Persephone feels the fluttering, familiar now, a stirring in the pit of her belly. Her grin sharpens. “I’m his wife, and I can tell him whatever I want.”





	At the Turning of the Year

_**I.** _

He comes for her in the last lingering days of summer, on a day when there ain’t so much as a nip in the breeze, let alone the chill of oncoming autumn. On that day, Persephone hears the high, long, lonesome whistle of a train pulling up to the platform and knows it to be the call of her husband. Knows he’s come to fetch her down home. For the first time in an age—hell, the first time in a _millennium—_ she ain’t sure whether she wants to go with him or not.

“Let Hades come here,” she tells the porter who eventually turns up at Ma’s gate stuttering slack-jawed apologies. “Tell him I got something to show him. Tell him if he wants to see it, he better pick up his own two feet and walk.”

“Ma’am—” the girl’s got a sweetness about her eyes and a hollowness about her cheeks that pricks Persephone deep in the gut “—I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“You can’t,” Persephone agrees, and yawns. It’s early. Sun hardly risen and she’s barefoot on the garden path, hair scraped into a thick braid that bounces between her shoulder blades, one of her cousin Dionysus’s old pairs of overalls (the only pair that’ll fit her now) stretched tight across her belly. Aside from the belly, this still-unfamiliar part of her slung low and heavy as a boulder, she feels like a girl again. She could be a girl again, bare-faced and bare-headed, barefoot and squaring up to the future with a gut already half-curdled.

“...Ma’am?”

Already half-curdled, and no good comes of waiting. “You can’t,” Persephone repeats. “But honey, you’re speaking for me, and I’m his wife.”

She plants one hand to the small of her back while the girl’s mouth gapes rounder than her wide black eyes. “Oh.”

“That’s right.” Persephone feels the fluttering, familiar now, a stirring in the pit of her belly. Her grin sharpens. “I’m his wife, and I can tell him whatever I want.”

***

The two of them together? It’s an old song, old as time. Drowned by the rain and bleached by the sun and hung out to dry. Old as time, and time was (when Persephone was a girl, and Hades her husband as close to a boy as he’s ever likely to get) there was something fine about it despite all that. Something damn near luxurious in the way they made do with so little, his barren underground, the field for a wedding bed. They gorged on each other in those days—splayed wide in the grass, his lips on hers and her mouth opening to his, gasping aloud—then wondered why they came away sick.

And that was before Hades struck gold.

A gold ring on her finger, gold chains for her neck, gold inlay on the doors of the great palace that suddenly hulked up in the underground like the roots of a crumbled mountain. And those doors were always shut. His doors were always shut; their chatter dried up, and their laughter too, and when he took her it was never in a field but in their great dark bed, buried miles underground.

Persephone hated it all then, same as she hates it now. _This stuff,_ she’d snarl, _this place, it ain’t nothing to me._ Knowing how he would take it, her husband grown so hard and so cold, meaning it all the more: _You ain’t nothing to me._

Of course, these things happen. He had to come back with the girl, poor Eurydice, and the boy had to follow after them. And then, after it all, the riot quelled and the bargain settled and those two kids on their trembling way, just barely daring to hope, Persephone thought, Well, hell. If they can try, why can’t we? Those two kids, of course, never made it. Eurydice bartends at Persephone’s old haunt down in Hadestown. Orpheus hops trains, picks out his sad songs, and waits. But Persephone? She boarded that train with the seed of something new blooming in her belly, something to twist the tale, if not change it.

It’s a tale. It’s the binding of lives together. It’s an old song, old as time, and sometimes she wishes they’d quit singing it.

***

He comes for her. He stands at the gate, broad, rooted, all in black, and Hades stares at Persephone for a long time. Finally he says, the rumble in his voice a threat she doesn’t have time for, “You never told me.”

“Didn’t think there was anything to tell. Not for the first couple weeks.”

“Well,” he says, his lips pressed to a thin line. Hades flicks a hand out to gesture at Persephone, the whole of her, at the very same moment all that fluttering and stirring jolts into a kick hard enough to make her wince.

“For a while there I thought my courses had stopped for good,” she says. Her toes curl in the dirt and Persephone is gritting her teeth—mercy knows what he makes of that. “Thought I was just getting old. Then I thought—”

“You could have sent word down with Hermes.”

“—I thought, what if it withers up, doesn’t last? Might not be so old yet, but I am old. Husband,” Persephone says, and Hades is standing as stiff as she’s ever seen him, stiffer than even in their worst fights. She can’t tell the expression in his eyes behind those damn glasses, either. Only knows they’re fixed on her. “I didn’t want to disappoint you if it all came to nothing.”

He doesn’t soften. There’s a fraction of some tendon or wire that loosens deep within him, maybe. No more than that. “Six months.”

“Six months.” She tilts her chin, the better to stare up at him. “Got another three to go.” Without meaning to, Persephone swallows. She knew it would be tough, not that their reunions are ever anything but. There’s gravel scraped in here, into their every word. Could be she didn’t expect it to cut as bad as it does.

A muscle works in her husband’s jaw. He reaches up to slide off his glasses, opens his mouth—

Behind them, the screen door bangs open. “Hades? Is that you?”

He closes his mouth. Opens it again. “Demeter,” he says, right as Persephone snaps, “Who else, Ma?”

“You need to take this girl off my hands.” Persephone wheels around with a glare and finds the same glare slapped across her ma’s face. Demeter stands on the creaking stoop, barefoot herself, hands on her hips. “Been worrying around this place the whole summer long,” she says. “Been talking my ear off about you, of all people.”

“Mama—”

“I’m her husband,” says Hades. There’s no heat in those words anymore. Not like there used to be.

“Ain’t you just.” Demeter’s expression softens. Not much. “Lord, brother. You’re getting old.”

“Younger than you,” says Persephone.

“Think you still got the energy to handle whatever kind of hellion the two of you cooked up together?”

Hades looks at Persephone. Persephone looks at Hades.

“Too late,” her ma says, smug as pie. “Girl, I’ll bring the luggage out for you. Don’t drink—”

“—haven’t in months, Ma.”

“—and keep yourself warm, you hear me? Send word after the birthing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You promise?”

“Promise.”

“You better,” warns Demeter, and disappears into the house so quick she leaves the screen door flapping. Hades and Persephone stand, her in the garden, him still outside the gate.

“You could’ve come in, you know,” she says after a moment. “Like you said. You’re my husband.”

“You’re coming down,” Hades says as if he hasn’t heard her.

“Every year.”

“Should you?” The question’s forced out in such a way that if Persephone didn’t know any better she’d think he’s furious with her, and maybe he is—she’s not one for knowing better, not these days. “In your condition…”

Her feet ache. Her back aches worse. Persephone wants to sit down somewhere soft and cool with padded benches. She wants a break, a precious few minutes, from thinking about any of this. “It’s gonna be a winter baby,” she says, stepping towards the gate. “It might as well get used to the cold.”

***

They walk to the station together. Persephone doesn’t bother changing her clothes or fixing her hair, just stuffs her swollen feet into a pair of gardener’s boots. She also can’t link arms with Hades; he’s carrying all her luggage, even the flowery straw bag. They walk through the streets, to the station, and the whole way he doesn’t say a word to her.

Try, Persephone thinks, you’ve got to damn _try._ “Profits been good?” she asks.

“Mmm.” Hades grunts. The sun’s risen enough now that the street’s getting crowded, or as crowded as it ever gets in this one-stop town. Grimy-faced mortals with downcast eyes hurrying one way or the other, any way but the one Hades and Persephone are taking. Some are from out of town, hobos and drifters, but most have been here since Persephone and Ma first settled the land. She knows them well. So well she can feel the burn of Hades’ eyes on them, the resentment they scurry away from. They saw her come home in the spring, saw her getting bigger and bigger. They’re mortals, poor dirty country ones at that, and they knew before he did. Her own husband.

 _Lover,_ she wants to say, _throw it all on me. It ain’t them. You know it._ She doesn’t. She lays her hand on his arm instead, and Hades ignores it.

Up on the platform, Hermes blinks and blinks again as he sees them coming. He hauls Persephone up while Hades hands off the luggage, whispers, “Girl, how’d you manage to hide _this?”_

“Slipped it up my skirt, what do you think?” Persephone wipes her eyes. The dust’s set them running. “They got any water at the bar?”

Hermes squeezes her hands. “I’ll go see.”

They do, and she spends most of the ride down nursing a glass, condensation beading off on her hands, icy drops dotting the stretched swell of her overalls. As they’re swallowed by the darkness of the tunnels and the filigree-fine gold lamps flicker to life, Persephone shifts her huge and swollen self on the padded bench that’s nowhere near as padded as she remembers, presses the side of the dripping glass to her temple, and studies her husband. The whole way down he’s been pretending to work on the ledger cracked open across his knees. Hades clears his throat, grunts, flips the pages. He shifts as much as she does. Keeps stealing glances at her belly, like somehow she won’t notice, and whenever he does he’ll spend a good five minutes afterwards staring at the scribbled records, face emptied out. Lost.

Try. Persephone lowers the glass. “You want to touch it?” she asks.

He still hasn’t taken off his glasses. Must’ve clean forgot about them, unless he’s decided she ain’t worthy to look him in the eye anymore. Doesn’t seem like he’s heard her question, either—Persephone’s about to repeat it when Hades stirs. “What?”

She rolls her eyes. “You want to touch it? Feel the kicking?”

Again his gaze drops to her belly. Hades doesn’t answer.

Lord, but she _married_ this man. Persephone shifts one more time, getting as upright as she can. “It’s been kicking up a storm since you came around,” she says. “Come here. Come on over.”

In a rustle of pages, he comes to her. Stoops as awkwardly as a schoolboy, waiting for her to take his hand and press it where she wants. It’s cold and dry, dusty and calloused. Persephone threads her fingers through his a minute, then smooths down his palm and presses it to her firmly. “Feel that?” she asks, thinking, First time you’ve touched me since last winter, first time in a damn long while, why won’t you look at me?

Hades nods. He straightens. He goes back to his seat and picks up the ledger.

Persephone watches him. “Gods almighty,” she hears. “Hades, you got to talk to me. Sooner or later, we got to talk.”

Beneath them and several feet of steel and whirling gears, the tracks plunge deeper and darker down. The lamps flicker pitch-velvety-black for less than the space of a breath. Hades mutters something about fixing the wiring. Then he says, “You said you didn’t want to disappoint me.”

“I didn’t.” She’s snapping, her hackles up—what’s wrong, what the hell went wrong where she can’t even talk about their _baby_ without snarling like a stray dog after a bone, where she couldn’t bring herself to tell him for six goddamn months? Persephone wonders, but not enough to stop.

Lamplight glazes across Hades’ glasses, blazing white. “The tale’s told. What’s done is done.”

It takes a sight more willpower than Persephone thought she had to stop from pitching the glass at his head. “You think I don’t know that?”

“Wife,” he says, “I can’t begin to guess what you think.”

***

The palace is as dark as Persephone remembers, as cold as Persephone remembers, and as cluttered with the kind of junk she wouldn’t leave to rust in a barnyard, except it’s covered in gold leaf and studded with diamonds and under her feet no matter which way she turns.

“I told you to clean this place out,” she seethes. “How’re we supposed to keep a baby in this dump?”

Hades drops the luggage on her side of the bed. “If you’d told me—”

“Don’t give me that! You’re a king, doesn’t it bother you, wallowing around here like a pig in the mud?”

He turns his back on her and stalks to the bathroom. Persephone sinks to his side of the bed—where the sheet’s still crumpled back, hasn’t even bothered to make it—and covers her face with her hands. It ain’t working out right, none of it, and time’s wasting, wasted already, but she’s been asking him to do this for years, knowing if she throws out so much as a paper clip she’ll be in the doghouse for days, and isn’t it enough that she’s got to live half her life with the earth bearing down, ready to crush the breath out of her, without having to wade through his mess in the meantime? Hades, he told her they’d try, and she did, and she’s trying, so why the hell isn’t he?

Water splashes in the sink. Persephone hears the pipes clattering and groaning through the walls. She huffs out a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says when he opens the bathroom door. “The trip was long, is all.”

Hades nods. He’s finally gotten rid of the glasses. His eyes look somehow creased, red-rimmed from the smoke and smog of the station and as tired as Persephone guesses hers must be. “You should rest,” he says. “I’ll have the maids bring something up for dinner.”

It’s a long shot, but— “Lie down with me?”

Another glance at her belly. “Not this time. I have to finish up the accounts.”

“I guess they must be sticking around only ‘till springtime, too.” It pops out without her thinking.

Hades unties Persephone’s boots for her, slipping the cracked, dirty old things off her feet before he leaves.

***

“If you could run it as is for the time being...” Persephone trails off. The girl’s giving her one of those looks, Why do bother asking me when you own my soul and everything else, the kind that has Persephone guilty as sin and bristling up at the same time, ‘cause, Sister, I didn’t lure you down here, and I sure wasn’t the one you sold your soul away to. She runs one finger along the length of the bar counter. “Looks to me like you’ve been doing just fine on your own, anyway.” Cleaner than she ever bothered keeping the place. Drinks are cheaper, too.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Eurydice sounds pleased by that, at least. And she looks better than she did when Persephone left, still pale and wan but more solid at the edges. Determined to face whatever she’s got coming and then some.

“You taking care of yourself?” Persephone asks. Like she’s got any right to know.

Eurydice shrugs. Her closed, narrow look melts a bit. “The work helps.”

“Good. That’s good.” Lord. She sounds like her Aunt Hestia. Persephone absentmindedly gropes for her flask before realizing for what seems like the thousandth time in as many months that it’s dumped out and lying empty under her bed up at Demeter’s place. “Better get out of here,” she says. “Before this place drives me back to drink.” She smiles, knowing there ain’t much more than guilt behind it.

Eurydice hesitates. “Congratulations,” she says, casting Persephone the sort of furtive look everyone in Hadestown seems to have picked up. Like they know they ain’t supposed to see she looks ready to drop a litter any minute.

Persephone shakes her head. “It ain’t fair, girl,” she says. “Don’t tell me you don’t know that.”

The smile Eurydice flashes is as sharp as one of Persephone’s own.

***

The months roll by. Autumn fades, then withers. About ready to freeze into winter now.

Persephone sleeps on her side when she can sleep. When she can’t—more nights than not—she paces the halls of the palace, between the shadowy dark columns and the endless warrens of parlors and galleries and salons they never did manage to fill up. Parties. Way back when they’d wanted to throw lots of parties, flash their dough a little. Why not? They hadn’t always had it. None of their family, not Ma or any of the aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters up on the mountain, had guessed they ever would.

_Man’s my own brother, think I’d say this if I didn’t mean it? He’ll suck you dry._

“Think any of them would have come?”

Something awful like a start, if not exactly, flickers through her husband’s buttoned-up black frame, and he looks up from behind his desk. It’s hours past midnight, well into morning. Persephone’s spent plenty of time out of their bed, as has he, but this is the first time she’s come to his office door. Hades’ eyes flicker from her wild burst of hair to her billowing nightgown, down to her feet. “You aren’t wearing stockings,” he says.

Persephone’s toes curl on the cold marble. “I’m an outdoor girl. Got summer in my blood.” When he starts to say something else she interrupts, “And I can tell you its little feet ain’t gonna freeze off, either.”

He shifts a stack of files. “Who would have come? To what?”

“The parties we were always planning on. Ma, Uncle Zeus, all the rest.” She props her folded arms on the swell of her stomach. “You think any of them would have made it down for that?”

Hades considers, fingers combing back through his white hair. And not even full gray when I met you, Persephone thinks. The fluttering in her belly kicks up a notch. Years, she thinks. Since the world began. Lord, we’re both getting old.

“Hermes.” Hades ticks the names off his fingers. “Your mother if you begged.”

Persephone snorts.

He raises an eyebrow, but continues. “Hestia, maybe. The twins—Apollo and Artemis. Dionysus.”

“He’d bring the booze, at least.”

“Why else would we invite him?”

“He’s my favorite cousin,” Persephone says.

“And you’ve got sterling taste in men, do you?”

She laughs. Somehow it sounds out full and warm, sweetening her tongue like dandelion wine when for months now all her laughs have felt closer to a mouthful of white whiskey. “Well tell me how it is, my man.”

Instead, Hades reaches over to dislodge a box of faded, parchment-thin papers from the chair that sits beside his, empty for going on a century or so. “Sit down,” he orders as the box hits the floor in a puff of fine flakes and must. Then looks up to her, his face for an instant flashing uncertain. “If you want.”

“On my feet half the night, what else do you think I want?” Persephone keeps the question light and her voice lighter. On her way over she trails out her fingers, flicks them through his already mussed hair. Not what she used to do, perching on his armrest before letting herself spill over into his lap, but maybe close enough. Anyhow, there’s a good bit more to Persephone now than one lap can hold.

***

As soon as Persephone broke the news Demeter started laughing fit to beat the band. “A baby?” she wheezed. “Oh, honey. I’m sorry, I just...just…” she took a minute to collect herself, then sat back, creaking in her chair. “All those nights I thought you were coming home drunk. Sick as a dog, you poor baby…” Much later, she asked, “Your husband know?”

“What do you think?”

“Secrets like that don’t keep. Up top or down below.”

Persephone tapped her fingers against her still-flat belly, thinking of her husband, a hulk of black on the platform watching her go. Thinking of Eurydice and her last glimpse of sunlight, thinking of Orpheus and his lonely songs poured out to the empty air.

***

“A crib?” From this angle it doesn’t much resemble one, but Persephone sweetens up her tone as much as she can.

Hard as he tries to hide it, she’s pretty sure she catches a rumble of pride in Hades’ voice. “Had it special ordered.”

“From Hephaestus?” From all the gossip swapped between her ma and her aunt Hestia over the summer, Persephone’s gathered that her cousin’s going through some kind of experimental phase. “It sure ain’t mail-order,” she says.

Come night, dozing off in her uncomfortable chair in his crammed-full office, Persephone watches the hunch of her husband’s shoulders over his books (the books she has the head but never the patience for) and wonders, What did it cost you? Not in money. They’ve got money to fill all the coffers of the world, or near enough. Hades’ pride has always come dearer to him than his money. He never buys what he can’t make, and if he can make it, he makes it better than anyone else. Hephaestus knows this, and he ain’t the type not to rub it in. Like all the rest of them up on the mountain, and like her ma, and like Persephone herself.

***

The drink, now that was a bear to give up. She’s known it would be since she was a slip of a thing sneaking into Uncle Zeus’s wine cellar alongside Dionysus; Persephone’s always been the type to seek her succor from the fruit of the vine, the tin of morphine. Substances, even the kind brewed up in a bathtub in the backwoods, are dependable. Living, breathing folks—god or mortal—not so much.

Some nights it still gets into her, the fever of needing something, just about anything, flowing down her throat or into her veins. When Hades backs off, cold as if he’s never known her, when she snaps at him, when the factories belch out smoke and heat thick enough to choke on, when she can’t sleep and can’t breathe and, bloated up like a whale, panting like the guard dogs at the wall, paces in feverish circles, telling herself at least she ain’t mortal, at least going off the drink so fast, after so long, didn’t kill her.

One night, that’s how her husband finds her. Out on the balcony, muttering and cursing over the live-coal glow of the city, her mouth dry, her tongue parched, her skin a live wire and her belly a deadweight she can’t throw off. Gods almighty. She hates feeling like a broodmare. She hates feeling like the vessel of something that ain’t herself.

Gods almighty. She needs a _drink._

Then, of all things, his voice, deep as the mines: “Persephone?”

“What do you want?”

A pause. “It’s late.”

“Sure is.”

Another pause. Longer. “Songbird—”

She swears something inside her cracks, simple as that. Songbird? Last time she heard that—who knows. Last time he said it and meant it—who the hell knows. It’s too soft a name for him to speak now, and too puffed up and pretty a name for her to wear easily. “I’m drowning,” Persephone says, suddenly and finally. “Drowning down here, and I was drowning up top, and I don’t see as how you can help me, Hades.”

He was the reason for it. Under him there was always her, of course, her and her need to mask all the mess with a sharp face and sharper words. Red wine gave her a silver tongue, dandelion a golden one, and white whiskey stripped her throat raw whether she’d just finished shouting herself hoarse or not. Masks, all of them. For when they fought, when he laughed at her, when he made a fool of her as if she weren’t his queen. Like she didn’t have the power to break him in all the same little ways he broke her. Like she still doesn’t.

_Have a drink, why don’t you?_

Why don’t I? she’d like to spit. ‘Cause I’m carrying your damn baby, is what. Fists knotted at her sides, Persephone turns away from the city. The heat of it pulses at her back. “So,” she growls, “what do you _want?”_

Her husband stands there in his black dressing gown, his white hair rumpled and his wrinkled old knees bare to the cottony wind blowing off the city. He runs a hand over his face. “Come to bed.”

“I ain’t tired.”

“Neither am I.”

Remembering all his slights of the last couple hundred years, all his slights of today, she looks at him a long time. Hades, like as not marking up his own talley, holds out the same hand. He reaches for her. “Come on, songbird,” he says. “Come on to bed.”

***

They ain’t used to sleeping side-by-side, still less so now that Persephone’s as big as she is. This winter Hades hasn’t touched her overmuch, not usually unless she’s allowed him to feel the kicking or touched him first. Sometimes, though, he reaches out in the night.

First time he tried she flinched, and he drew his hand back like beneath her nightgown Persephone was hiding a nest of vipers. “No,” she hissed, too tired to be kind about it, to do more than try. “Your hand’s cold. Give it here.” She took it, rubbed it. Persephone huffed her warm breath onto his fingers, into his cupped palm, and then she guided Hades’ hand under her rucked-up hemline. “There. That’s good. You keep it there,” she said, and closed her eyes.

***

“Got a name picked out?” Demeter asked her, week or two before the train.

Persephone shrugged.

“Got any ideas?”

“Whatever I pick, Hades is sure to think it’s the most godawful name he’s ever heard. We’ll just battle it out when I get underground.”

“Gonna be another bad year for blizzards, then.”

***

“You’ve thought of one?”

“Not a bit,” Persephone admits. His breath puffs against the back of her neck, nonplussed. “Hey, now. I didn’t want to have my heart set on some name you wouldn’t spit at. That was Aunt Hera with Hephaestus, and look how well he and Uncle Zeus started out.” The mattress creaks. Hades makes a grumbling sound. “I know, I know. You ain’t your brother.” She stops, wondering if she should turn around to face him before realizing what a production that would be and deciding against it. “What I didn’t know,” Persephone begins, and stops again. This isn’t something they’ve talked about in a good long while, or _really_ talked about in ever.

Did you want kids? Thing was, she hadn’t, not when they’d first married. Persephone’d been a girl then, so close to a kid that making one of her own would’ve seemed a joke had she thought about it at all. Which she hadn’t. Plenty of baby cousins left up on the mountain still. Plenty of mortal kids running the streets of her hometown. Plenty of boys and girls following their fathers and mothers down to Hadestown, even. If she wanted, there was always some little one to scoop up, burble at for a few minutes, and hand back over without having to bother with the crying and the grizzling and the spit-sticky fingers.

Hades shifts next to her. Oh, sure, make yourself comfortable, Persephone thinks a little sourly. Ain’t like you’re lugging a ten-pound weight in your gut. “Remember the company picnics?” he asks.

“Lord, those sorry excuses for parties?”

This time his grumble ain’t so soft. “I’m sorry I never had enough kegs brought in to satisfy you.”

“Well, I’m sorry you served people who’d been busting tail for you the whole year round cheap beer that tasted like shit,” she snipes back.

“I’m sorry,” says Hades, “that I couldn’t trust my own wife to stay sober no matter how cheap the beer was.”

“You’re lucky,” Persephone snarls, “that I can barely move right now.”

She hears the mattress creak, springs squealing as some of their combined weight lets off it and hopes he’ll stalk back to his office or the garage or any one of their millions of deserted rooms. Hades is impossible. She’s impossible. And so damn sick of trying.

He’s fumbling around at the side of the bed. Probably looking for his socks. “I’ll go sleep on the sofa.”

“Tell me,” she says.

There’s a thump. Hades curses. “What?”

“Do I remember the company picnics,” Persephone grits out, practically feeling the mix of stubbornness and anger sanding her teeth down.

“I was only going to say you were always good with the younger ones.”

“The kids you sent down to the mines, you mean.”

Footfalls start up, thump to her side of the bed. Persephone glares up at the shadowy bulk of her husband. The bulk that starts as if to say something, then huffs and turns away.

“Spit it out,” she calls after him. “I ain’t got all night.”

Hades is already at the door. “I always wanted what you wanted,” he says, something so dark in his voice, something deep and jagged enough to catch, and it snags right through Persephone though she braces for it, swearing it won’t. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

After he leaves, the door clicking shut behind him, she buries her hot face in her crumpled pillow and smooths her clenched fists out across her belly. “Poor thing,” she mutters to it. “You got such liars for parents, lil’ bit.” Such liars, and not even a name yet to call its own.

***

Of course she remembers the company picnics. Bits of them, anyway. This was back in the old days, Hadestown being an actual town and not a grimy, belching metropolis, and the veins of gold being new-struck. Her husband had it in his head then that he could be some kind of father-boss, stern but fair, doling out work and opportunity to grateful mortals even while he kept them firmly in their place. So. There was a picnic every summer in the Elysian Fields, blankets spread out and tables set up on the ashy gray grass. There was beer and lemonade, sandwiches and big bowls of fresh fruit shipped down from up top, and usually a musical act or two. Sometimes that act was Persephone. Most times she declined, drank beer and topped off the lemonade with her flask, and tried to get through the whole ordeal of nervous mortals and puffed-up husband quick as she could.

The kids, though. You could always count on the kids being themselves. Chasing each other around, making themselves sick with too many sandwiches, yapping and yelping like a bunch of puppies. It didn’t take much, once her flask was mostly drained, to get Persephone yapping and yelping along with them. She set up games of tag and leapfrog, bounced the littlest ones on her hip and swung them about by the arms. Caught her husband staring at her then and figured he was just working himself into lather, her not acting the perfect picture of the boss’s wife. But Hades couldn’t pry a baby out of her arms any more than he could fish the flask out of the front of Persephone’s dress.

It didn’t occur to her that he might not want to.

***

In the cold and gushing rains of early December (the rains that seep through the earth to sputter in the forges and turn all the roads of Hadestown to churned-up muck) Persephone feels another gush burst from between her legs and knows then that her time’s run out.

Naturally, she ain’t at the palace when this happens. Big as she is, and bored as she is, and dry as she is, Persephone’s been heaving herself downtown to the bar, where she can at least slaver over the smell of booze, if not the taste.

Naturally, Hades ain’t at the palace either.

“Inspecting factories up in the south quarter,” she manages—nothing’s coming on very fast yet, but Persephone’s already tense, pulled-tight and waiting. “Lord knows which one.”

“One of the foremen will.” If Eurydice wonders why Persephone didn’t have the sense to ask, nor Hades the sense to tell her, she keeps her face bland as a pie plate. After sending one of the barflies running to the central office she takes Persephone’s arm. “You want to step into the back, ma’am? I got a cot set up there. Might be more comfortable.”

“Girl, I ain’t been comfortable in nine months.” But she follows despite a wild, hot pulsepoint of panic: If I lie down now, I’m like to never get up again. In between not telling her husband and then telling her husband, Persephone hasn’t spared much thought for the birth itself, let alone what comes after. Probably she won’t die. Her ma didn’t, and neither did any of the aunts up on the mountain, though she ain’t up on the mountain, or even under open sky. She’s buried hundreds of feet beneath earth and stone.

The sight of Eurydice’s cot reassures her. It’s a tiny, narrow thing, all rust and a mattress about as soft as the floorboards underneath it. The girl puts in an effort, plumping up her single pillow before wedging it behind Persephone’s back, but the odds of never rising from this? Persephone’ll take them.

“So he got you out of the barracks, at least.” In her time, she used the back room mostly for storage. Eurydice’s turned it homey, a glass jar of hothouse flowers on the window sill, faded magazine pictures tacked to the walls. Like Persephone’s own bedroom up top, and she’s seized by another burst of panic: Get me on the train, get me out of here. Take me home.

“I got myself out of the barracks,” says Eurydice, then, “Oh! I’m sorry, ma’am.”

She’s still holding the girl’s arm. Just squeezed the life out of it, too. “Ain’t you,” Persephone gasps, willing herself to let go. She can’t. “Ain’t you, it’s...lord, girl,” she blurts out, “why are you helping me?”

‘Cause she’s the boss’s wife. It ain’t any more complicated than that; Persephone knows this. Eurydice sure does, yet she shrugs, says, “You did your best to help me.”

“Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth,” Persephone mutters, cold in the sweat already beading her face, cold in the grip of a giant fist that squeezes just so she knows in a few hours’ time it’ll be squeezing that much harder. “I never saw a baby born before. My aunts, they were popping most of theirs out when I was still a kid. My ma said watching then would put me off forever.”

Eurydice shakes her head. “I’ve seen plenty of babies born,” she says quietly. “You’ll do just fine.”

***

Weeks before, he asked her who she wanted brought down. Her ma, who for this would have come flying, her Aunt Hestia, her Aunt Hera. “Anyone,” he said. “Give me their names.”

“You know what they said up on the mountain? When I told them I’d married you? Told me your seed would freeze inside me.”

“That was years ago.”

“Millions,” she said. “I remember.”

***

She’s been alive more or less since the earth rose up and the world began, and Persephone doesn’t believe she’s lived through anything near as long as the hours it takes this baby to show its face. Whole time she’s grunting and straining to the clatter and rumble of the bar. Workers who knew her better as a slim, laughing thing in spring-green lace charging them a pretty penny for rain on tap crowd in, waiting for some word from her, watching for some sign of her husband. Taking an awful long time for word to get to the south quarter—roads are swamped, telegraph lines down. In some hazy point at a time Persephone can’t begin to guess the walls rattle around them and the floor beneath them, and it turns out that a blast in one of the deeper mines collapsed a whole section of it. Six men at least waiting to be dug out.

“Never rains but it pours,” assures Eurydice, with the set look of someone who’s weathered worse and can’t allow herself to start worrying. Somehow she rustles up clean sheets, hot water. “You can walk around a bit, ma’am,” she tells Persephone. “Some women say it helps.”

Eventually somebody thinks to send for one of the plant doctors, a withered sad sack of a man who ain’t half as helpful. Tells Persephone she needs to lie back down, seems to need his fingers inside her every other second or so, ‘till she snaps, “We courting or what? At least buy me a drink,” and he pales and stutters and calls her ma’am and lady and Persephone thinks she’ll be sick.

She strains not to push, and then all of a sudden they’re telling her Go on, come on, and she has to strain to push. Eurydice on one side, Old Man Medicine on the other, Persephone could split her skin and crawl out if she thought it would bring her any relief, and Good, that’s fine, you rest a bit now. A bit, it’s always a bit and never enough…

She wants her ma.

She wants sunlight, fresh air to gulp down.

She wants—

Some time, some time in the middle of the worst of it there’s a stir in the bar, shouts, the shriek of car horns, doors slamming open, footsteps Persephone hears but can’t quite put together, two and two—at the moment she’s bawling like a cow, knees drawn up, old man needs to look again, “If I wanted you and everyone else up in there I’d drop down on the street corner, spread my legs,” hardly getting the words out through her panting and groaning, breathless, busting out of her seams—

Door to the back room flies open.

She smells dust, and damp, and gunpowder. Smells the hot breath of the mines.

Hears, “Persephone.”

Eurydice squeezes her hand. Persephone squeezes back, fit to break her bones. “Took you long enough,” she growls. _“What?”_

Her husband—the mess of him, good coat torn, white hair gray with dust, face gray too, dribbling from a cut at his temple—growls back, “Let the man do his job.”

She’s crying. Didn’t notice, not ‘till now. “Fuck you. Fuck the fucking car you rode in on. Come here,” Persephone says. “Come here.”

***

Doesn’t go easier after that. Not at all.

But her husband’s here.

***

They tell her later there was a cry, a great big healthy one, but by the time it comes Persephone’s too far gone to hear it. Her ears ringing, she shudders like a winter wind while Eurydice bends over her. The girl’s kneading at Persephone’s stomach. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ve got to push again. It’s got to come out.”

That’s the gist of what she says, anyway. Full, clear words ain’t coming through so good. Persephone pushes. She’s too tired to do anything else.

Time comes when she smells gunpowder again, feels the brush of Hades’ sleeve on her cheek, and breathes out deep when he places the weight—such a small, soft weight—on her chest. “Oh,” whispers Persephone. “Hey now. Hey, baby.” Then she gets a good look at it.

Ugliest thing she’s ever clapped eyes on. Ashy all over, sloughing off these pale flakes, face swollen up and smeared with blood like a prizefighter’s. Full head of hair, for what that’s worth. Persephone remembers enough of her baby cousins to guess none of them slid out ready for their close-up, but… “Everything all right?” she asks. They’ve both been swaddled up; she’s still shaking. Her teeth chatter. “It ain’t broken, is it?”

She finds herself looking up, looking to Hades for reassurance (and she hasn’t looked to him for that in...well, who’s counting?). ‘Course, the man can’t know a wit more about babies than she does; he’s wearing the same helpless-horrified look, struggling to bury it under all his rocky layers and getting nowhere. “Well?” he says, so gruff Old Man Medicine almost drops the bowl full of blood, slimy dark sac, and clamped-off cord. “Is it?”

The doctor stammers. Eurydice’s voice overcomes his easily, though it’s soft as some small warm thing curled up in its burrow. “There’s nothing wrong with your baby.” She locks eyes with Persephone. “It’s only a little bruised.”

“And ugly as sin.” It’s flailing about a bit now. The poor thing snuffles and grizzles up on Persephone, so small and crumpled she’s afraid to touch it. Afraid to move at all in case she sends it sliding off like a sled down an icy slope. “Boy or girl?”

“Girl. A _beautiful_ baby girl,” adds Eurydice, looking at both of them now. She mops the sweat off her forehead, hands and forearms speckled with red. “Congratulations.”

“For what? Women been doing this since the world began,” Persephone says, out of habit and not the fact that she feels like everything from her waist down’s split wide open, red and raw. A little girl, set on her chest as if Persephone’s as big as a mountain, the whole of her world. As if she’s a soft place to land. Gods almighty. When’s she ever been that for anyone?

“Thank you,” Hades rumbles over their heads, “for looking after her. For looking after them both.” He’s fumbling for the words a little, and when Persephone flicks another glance up at him she sees his eyes on Eurydice, Eurydice’s eyes on him, and their whole sorry history stretched tight between them. She sees that they’re both sweaty, and bloody, and tired. She sees the fingerling bruises starting to blotch the girl’s arms and the splotch of her own vomit staining her husband’s shirt.

“Did more than look after me,” she reminds him as gently as her thin, screeched-hoarse voice will allow. “We’ll be out of your hair as soon as we can, girl. Made a real mess of your home.” This ain’t her place anymore. Likely it never really was.

Both Eurydice and Hades blink down at her like Persephone’s said something outrageous. “Ma’am, you better at least nurse her first,” says the girl. As if the thought’s only now occurring to her, “Does she have a name?”

“Does she?” Persephone looks at Hades. Hades looks at Persephone. “We’ll worry about that once she’s fed,” she finally says, and sees the relief flash, hopelessly bald, over his exhausted face. That relief touches something in her. “You’ll take her out afterwards, won’t you,” she tells him. “Your children out there, they been waiting.”

“They’re not my children,” he says roughly.

Persephone’s sure she just saw Eurydice roll her eyes. “No more, hmm? But they’re waiting. Been waiting. They got a right to see.”

 

_**II.** _

Persephone goes to her at all barefoot, blundering hours of the night and early morning, wakes to high thin yowls like a kitten’s and knows it to be her daughter. If she ain’t fast enough, Hades will be the first one out of their bed and shuffling towards the crib, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that except Persephone—see, she’s seen him wield a pick and a shovel, heard him wield words with the kind of skill that should freeze your blood, or boil it. It don’t follow from there that she should worry over his jostling the baby, or dropping her. Ain’t like he’ll just let the only child they’re likely to have slip through his big hands.

Yet she’s a tiny thing. Fattened up some since her birth. Not enough, and her breath flutters so uneven sometimes Persephone has to check the urge to poke her awake, make sure she still can wake, that she’s not drifted out of her scrap of a body.

“You think I wouldn’t know if she had?” Hades asks. All the same, he lingers beside the crib as long as Persephone does. Tension knots inside him, brimming under the black of his dressing gown. Persephone grabs his hand sometimes. Others, she’s too brim-full herself to take on any of his. If the baby does leave them, if she goes without even a name—

They still haven’t settled on one. In the beginning Hades would offer up whole lists. Rhea, after his ma— “And my grandma,” Persephone said, “our girl ain’t getting an old woman’s name.” Elysia, after the fields—“Kids up on the mountain would laugh her right down it.” Semele, Callisto, Leda—“All girls your brother tossed the hay with, you think I’m stupid?” She had in mind something a little brighter, summer-like. Eupheme. Adoni.

Too many frills, said Hades, and Persephone snapped what did she know about frills, he was the one wanting to deck the baby out in cloth-of-damn-gold while it was still in diapers and spitting up half of what it sucked down. At that Hades slammed his fountain pen—he’d had his desk dragged into their bedroom, adding a makeshift office to the makeshift nursery—into the inkwell so hard ink splashed across his meticulously copied records. “We might’ve had this sorted out already if you hadn’t given me only three months.”

“If wishes were horses.” Persephone muscled past the guilt. Ain’t going down this road. Not again.

“You and I would ride.” He studied her a minute. Cleared his throat. “Tell you what,” said Hades, “we’ll leave it alone for now. She’s so young, it can’t bother her.”

Lord, thought Persephone. This is what we’ve come to. “She’ll need something on her papers.”

“I’ll handle the papers.”

Try. It scraped through her head, a jumped-up little sandpaper rasp. He’s trying. Why ain’t you? “All right,” she said.

Hades reshuffled the ruined records. “All right.”

Though excepting the names, they’ve kept their bickering to a minimum since the baby was born. Bickering needs fuel, needs energy, and nobody runs on empty. Persephone can feel herself slipping closer and closer; she has to parcel out what she has with care. Most goes to the baby. Some to Hades. These days, she ain’t half so willing to waste it all in snapping at his throat.

Anyhow, he cares about the baby. In the early days she worried he’d resent her, or simply have no idea what to do with her and from the shame of that bundle himself off to his office or the factories or the mines, leaving the both of them alone as he left Persephone before. For years and years and _years,_ neither of them with the sense to realize they were as lonely as they were mad. She couldn’t bear to raise a baby in that mess. At least he seems to understand that.

He dresses her up so fine. The baby, and Persephone too, she supposes. Cloth-of-gold ain’t the half of it.

“No. Ain’t no way you’re giving her diamonds to play with.” She put her foot down then. “I’ll send word to Ma, and she can ship some of my old stuff down. That’ll do fine enough. She ain’t old enough to do more than gum at it, anyway.”

The baby’s so small yet even gumming sometimes feels little more than a hope for the future, but Persephone enjoys it, sorting through all the scraps of her far-off, dust-red, clapboard days. Ma sends Aunt Hera’s hand-me-down baby buggy, a couple of rattles, a stuffed bear, a bundle of feed sack outfits, and a quilt patched of the same.

Hades tests the material between his fingers and only says, “I would have bought you something finer.”

“You and your eye for fine things.” Persephone snatches the quilt back and folds it delicately, breathing in the whiffs of sunshine and green grass still lingering in its creases. “This was all I had when I was her age,” she says. An ache pokes through the back of her throat. “I didn’t want for nothing else.”

Nighttime, their daughter wakes them with her squalling and Persephone brings her into the bed. Cradling the baby with one arm, she fumbles at the buttons of her nightgown with her free hand until Hades brushes it away and undoes them for her, his own fingers sleep-heavy and no more practiced than hers. The baby grunts and whines, roots and sniffles ‘till she’s found what she wants. She sucks and sucks; some nights, Persephone feels a little of the heaviness flow out of her along with the milk. She’ll look over to Hades then, him with his low-lidded eyes fixed on their daughter’s dark head, full of something Persephone is too tired to fathom, and surely he’s too tired to fathom it himself. Hades will raise his eyes when she brushes her thumb along his cheek or jaw. He’ll close them, lean into her touch, and murmur, “How long?”

Persephone will answer, with a tenderness she hasn’t felt in decades, “Since the world began.”

***

Now, this is all ain’t to say life down below suddenly turns up nothing but roses, peaches and cream rich as mother’s milk. Hades has the factories and mines shut down the day after the birth, thanks to the rain-flooded streets and collapsed tunnel as much as anything else, but on that day all the bars and taverns and blues joints and dance halls of Hadestown swarm full, and drinks are poured and raised to the health and long life of the boss’s new daughter, whom a good chunk of Eurydice’s regulars first drank to when they saw her carried out in her father’s arms, tiny swaddled-up thing cradled like he wouldn’t know a baby from a pickaxe (like Persephone hadn’t felt him place their daughter on her breast, all the doubt and cautious, cautious tenderness of his rough hand cupped over the baby’s tiny dark head). Most of them, probably, are grateful for the day off and snickering that she was born on the bar floor and not behind the locked doors of the palace, Takes after her ma already, who’s gonna pay for the next round, not me, brother, not me. It’s a party, at any rate. A little light, laughter, and brightness in the teeth of the coming winter.

The day after that, it’s back to work.

Accident at the mines knocks everything off track. Hades is gone more days than he’s home; the year previous, as with all the years before, Persephone would’ve taken herself out to the city, danced, drank, and lived it up as best she could just to spite him. Or, if she were in the giving vein, she might’ve thought to roll up her sleeves, get down in the rubble, and help. She can’t do either of those things now. The baby’s so small, Persephone herself still so big, and broken to boot. For days afterward she kept to her bed, only stumbling out to nurse or to hobble to the bathroom, hobble back from there feeling like she was split open all over again and gritting her teeth against tears. Days still come when she can barely heave herself off the mattress, days when her husband gets back (Hades returns home near every evening, or tries to—it’s a new effort, and one she knows costs him) to find Persephone still in her nightgown, picking at the coverlet while their daughter howls in her crib.

“She ain’t hungry. About gummed me to a pulp only half an hour ago.”

From his expression, Persephone can tell he believes her, and that it doesn’t comfort him. “You should get dressed,” Hades says.

“Why? Whole day’s wasted already.” When he crosses over to the crib Persephone snaps, “Careful!”

She sees him tense, the familiar muscle twitching in his jaw when he turns back to her with the baby snugged safe at his shoulder, her howls guttering to whines, then to nothing at all. Always calms right down in Hades’ arms. Always thrashes in Persephone’s. And who’s the one holed up with her the livelong day?

“Get dressed,” says her husband. Persephone digs her nails into the plumpness of the coverlet, hating him.

***

Winter blues, she used to call them. Baby blues now, Persephone guesses. One morning in January or thereabouts she decides she may as well try beating them with a walk. They haven’t broken in Aunt Hera’s buggy yet, and that’s a crying shame—it’s a sleek little black thing, so pert and pretty she remembers longing to push her dolls around in it when she was a kid.

Dolls would’ve been easier. After buttoning herself into one of the dresses they had mail-ordered (it’s roomier in both the bust and waist, and Persephone wonders gloomily if she’ll ever fit back into her green lace or have to pick between these matronly things and Dionysus’s cast-offs for the rest of her days) she dresses her wailing, sticky daughter in a burst of white lace that stains the second it touches skin, packs her into the buggy nice and warm with some knit blankets, gets her own coat, decides not to bother with a bag, fends of the maids’ anxious protests, gets out the door, and realizes pushing the buggy down the long gravel drive, let alone the cluttered sidewalks of Hadestown, is no picnic.

First stop’s the bar, and by the time they reach it the baby’s worked herself into hysterics and Persephone’s so winded a glass of cold water looks as good to her as a foaming glass of beer. Eurydice welcomes them in, the workers on break raise their glasses, and the baby bawls louder than the screech of the factory whistles.

“She’s got a mouth on her,” Persephone grumbles. “Me being her ma, I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting that.”

“She’s already so much bigger.” Eurydice’s stepped out from behind the bar to peer into the buggy. She pokes out a cautious finger to stroke at the ruffles of lace. “And you’ve got her dressed up real nice, ma’am.”

Persephone nudges the buggy back and forth, back and forth. Her daughter quiets, but only so as to gulp down another breath and let it loose in a scream. “Not my doing. Hades’d have me thrown into Tartarus if he figured out I was parading our daughter around in feedsacks.”

Eurydice smiles. “Nothing wrong with feedsacks.”

“Nothing at all.” But she had a reason for coming here, and it wasn’t showing off the baby. Persephone clears her throat. “You did me a good turn,” she says. “I’m looking to make it up to you.”

“You can’t,” says Eurydice, immediately and so simply it’s hard to tell if there’s anger behind it or just plain, unvarnished truth. “You know what I want.”

“I do, girl. I do.” Back and forth, back and forth. “See, I didn’t write up the papers. I can’t bring you up there or him down here, but…” It ain’t nothing, what she’s offering. So paltry Persephone’s ashamed of herself, but what’s done is done and she’s been ashamed of herself so long that shame alone can’t stop her now. “...I could carry him a message, maybe. If you wanted to send one.”

“A message?” The word trembles. Just a touch.

“Sure, girl. Whatever you want.”

Her face paling, Eurydice turns away and strides into the back room. Moments later she reappears, a dented shoebox in her hands. Persephone watches her set it on the bar counter, shuffle through more clipped magazine pictures, a dried flower, a copy of her stamped and signed work contract. Finally Eurydice picks out a sealed envelope, unstamped and without an address. She holds it in her hand a minute, worrying the thin paper between her fingers, before handing it over as carefully as if it’s a baby bird, or the baby in the buggy next to them. “Make sure he gets it,” she says.

“Promise.” Wishing she’d bothered with her bag after all, Persephone tucks the letter between the folds of the blankets in the buggy, as far away from her daughter’s flailing feet as possible. “I’m sorry,” she says, quiet enough that thanks to the baby’s screams no one will hear her but Eurydice. “For how it all turned out—truly.”

“I am too,” says Eurydice. She picks up the box, then sets it back down. She bites her lip. “Ma’am?”

She pulls the carriage back a little too fast; the baby hiccups and Persephone ducks her head beneath the hood, sure for one terrible moment she’s choking. “Go on,” she says, once her heart’s started beating again.

“Mind if I hold her?”

“And take her off my hands a minute? I thought you’d never ask.”

Once Persephone’s left the bar—and it looks a deal finer than she remembers it being before, last winter or in the last couple weeks, new tables and sturdier chairs, a sign over the bar flashing _Eurydice’s_ in bright neon; it fills her up with shame and a shameful sort of tenderness, seeing her husband’s efforts at making amends—she shoves the carriage along to the slowest of the west quarter factories. Hades is walking the floor, one of the foremen tells her, and hauls the buggy up the stairs to the boss’s office for Persephone while she carries the baby up after him. Once he leaves, she paces through the cluttered little room, chattering as if her daughter will remember any of this. “That right there’s your daddy’s desk. Ain’t much of a housekeeper, is he?”

The baby, a little easier now that she’s out of the buggy, burbles into Persephone’s shoulder.

“Well, I guess you’re right. He does work awful hard.”

Behind them, the door creaks open.

“Too hard, sometimes,” Persephone finishes, turning with her best attempt at a smile. She’s still flushed and panting from the walk up. “I figured you’d skip your lunch break. This little girl wanted to stop by anyway. Say hello.”

Hades is flushed himself, coat off and sleeves rolled up, some kind of engine grease caked in the creases of his hands. He holds them up, says, “Honing machine keeps breaking down. I—”

“Don’t want to dirty my dress? Lord, man, I look a mess already.” Persephone kisses him, holds the baby up for a kiss, too. “She quieted right down soon as we stepped into the factory. I’m thinking she takes after you. Finds this whole kind of thing soothing.”

“Not so soothing when it’s coming down around your ears,” he says, but she can tell she’s pleased him. They talk about this and that for a space of time, the trouble with the machines and production quotas, what she should have the maids cook for dinner tonight. About as civil as they’ve been since they were first married and all but playing house; it’s a new feeling, and Persephone wants to chafe under it, yet she sees the look on her husband’s face and feels the weight of their baby in her arms and can’t bring herself to. Leastways not now.  

“We better be heading back,” she finally says.

Hades nods. “I’ll call you a car.”

“No need.” But she doesn’t protest when he reaches for the phone anyway. Persephone goes to get the buggy, seeing a corner of Eurydice’s letter peeking out from the folds of the blankets.

“It’s almost spring,” her husband says as he waits with them outside the factory gates, the baby snuffling in his arms. For the first time in an age, Persephone has trouble reading his tone.

Has trouble reading her own when she answers, “Still in a deep-freeze, last I heard. We got time yet.”

***

They don’t.

How it happens is, the baby gets collicky. Happens that Persephone’s breasts swell up hot and hard as rocks, and all the cold compresses in the world ain’t any help. Happens that the ground is so dark and frozen and the factories and mines so bright and blazing hot she has nowhere to turn, nothing stuck in the blessed middle. The air’s stale, so full of fumes she doesn’t dare take the baby outside now. The west quarter’s still falling behind. Her husband’s always gone. Persephone’s furious with him, furious with herself, furious at the baby who can’t stop wailing, furious that Eurydice’s letter still burns a hole in the pocket of her dress. She hasn’t had time to send it, go through the right lines. The poor girl’s waiting on her, and Persephone doesn’t know that she’ll _ever_ be able to send it. Seems too much work now, time she can’t spare. And ‘cause of all that, happens one afternoon she’s in bed, baby in her arms (baby who’s drunk her fill and then some, drawn all the milk burning out of Persephone and still cries like the world itself could fit in her belly), making these hacking, dry, sandpaper sounds. She hasn’t cried. Not for some while, and the sounds don’t bring up tears. They just continue, on and on.

When she hears the car roll to a stop on the gravel drive Persephone does her best to stifle them. When she hears the tread of his feet in the hall she lifts a hand to scrub at her dry eyes. When she hears his knock on the bedroom door she calls, “Come in,” and knows she ain’t fooling anybody.

Hades steps inside. The room’s got a scent of milk and heat and sickness to it; that must hit him strong. Stronger maybe than the sight of his wife and screaming baby, that being familiar by now.

Persephone grits her teeth. “The maids call you?”

“They did. The nursing isn’t getting any easier, then.”

“No. No, it ain’t.” Both of them are having to raise their voices over the baby’s. Persephone’s too exhausted, too sick to parse whatever’s working itself out in her husband’s face.

“Should I send for your mother?” he asks. “Would that help?”

Try, girl, you got to try. “No.”

“Tell me,” says Hades.

Damned if you don’t, damned if you do. Persephone shifts miserably, thinking she got plenty of that before the Three Sisters took their little traveling act on the road, she hasn’t got the wits left to pry herself from between the rock and the hard place. “It’s almost spring,” she says. “I’ll manage.”

The baby flails out, clawing into Persephone’s breast with her sharp little fingernails. It’s all Persephone can do not to drop her, the pain searing up fever-hot, and she lets out a sound not unlike the baby’s sobs, and then another not unlike a screech, ‘cause two arms are around her, straining, and both her and her daughter are being scooped out of the bed.

Hades’ breath puffs out with a soft _oof_ in her ear.

Bare feet dangling, hugging the baby to herself as hard as she dares, Persephone growls, “What are you _doing?”_

He turns slowly, ponderously. Hades heads for the door.

“The train ain’t running.” The hysterical edge to her own voice near cuts her.

“It’ll run.” They’re in the hallway now, and he’s panting, this fool, lord—

“Hades,” she says, “you’ll break your damn back.”

“Hades,” she says, “the girls are watching.”

“Let them watch,” he grunts, right as the newest of the maids sticks her poor pasty face out the study door, eyes wide as saucers, dust rag balled tight in her hand. Imagining what’ll spread through the streets of Hadestown—saw the boss ready to keel over from the weight of his wife in his arms, and her haranguing him the whole time—Persephone starts to laugh and can’t make herself stop. It’s the same desperate rasp of a sound as before; Hades doesn’t slow (not that he’s going especially fast anyhow) and the baby, silenced for once, blinks up from the cradle of Persephone’s arms, her round brown cheeks dribbled all over with fast-drying tears.

“Get my suitcase packed,” Persephone tells the maid. Has to crane her neck in order to meet the girl’s eyes over Hades’ shoulder, and she’s still laughing so hard getting the words out is a chore. “His, too. My husband’s taking us home.”

***

In the deep freeze of late winter, a train pulls up to the station platform with a whistle as high and lonesome as the wind.

Demeter’s waiting at her door by the time they reach it, eyebrows already hiked up good and high. They climb even higher at the sight of Hades forcing the buggy through drifts piled along the snow-dusted garden path. Persephone’s right behind him, a suitcase in each hand (“I been handling that thing for weeks, you think I wouldn’t rather haul around a suitcase full of your old drawers?”). She was gearing up for another argument at the gate, seeing as her husband ain’t been past it since the one time, ages ago, when he laid her down between the rows of blackberry cane. Sure enough, Hades unlatched the gate and waited for Persephone to go through. And once she did, a “Don’t you dare think about getting a room in town,” primed for her lips, he followed without a word.

“I got my bedroom made up for the three of you,” is the first thing her ma says. “Figured I could take yours for the night, girl—now, let me see the grandbaby.”

Truth be told, Persephone’s glad to leave them to their tentative truce, Demeter scooping the baby up and commenting on her size while Hades supplies the exact inches and pounds with the low-rumbling but obvious pride he usually reserves for factory profits. She takes the suitcases upstairs, nearly dumping them in her own bedroom despite what her ma just said. She crawls onto the full-sized bed and lies there a bit. Persephone breathes in the smells of dust, cold air from the drafts, and her ma’s perfume. She opens Hades’ suitcase, then hers, and slides her nightgown under the right pillow and his pajamas under the left. Demeter’s set up Persephone’s old bassinet, the one rigged out of a wicker basket, in the corner. The sky outside the bedroom window is full gloaming blue, near black. Fresh. She could drink it up.  

Downstairs, her ma heats a kettle at the stove. “How many nights he planning on staying?”

Hades sits at the kitchen table on a stool too small for him while the baby gurgles in his arms. Persephone pulls out the chair next to his. “Ask him yourself.”

“Brother? How many nights you thinking?”

“One. No more than two,” he says, not looking at Persephone.

“Hmm. When the cat’s away the mice will play.”

“He’ll be visiting,” says Persephone. “In a week or so, and during the summer, too.”

Both her mother and her husband stiffen—she hasn’t told them this before. Hades twists to Persephone, staring, and Persephone stares back. He’s her husband. Likely crippled himself heaving her out into the light, and when she’s lost him year after year...she ain’t going through that anymore. No matter that it would be easier to.

The kettle squeals. Demeter plucks it off the heat. “It ain’t no good for any child,” she says finally, “to leave their daddy behind six months of the year.”

“No good for a husband and wife, either,” says Persephone, “living apart so long.”

Her ma hasn’t an answer for that, only a crooked little smile. Before they head up to bed she spoons Persephone some cordial, syrupy-thick and summer-sweet. It slides down her throat smooth and light as rain, settles in her belly, and by the time she’s climbed the stairs, Hades and the baby ahead of her, the heat and heaviness in her breasts has eased some. “Hot water bottle will do for the colic,” Demeter told her. “That and patience.”

“Mama. You know I ain’t got but a mite of patience.”

“Mite more than you did last summer.”

She’s pondering over that as she closes the bedroom door. Hades has the baby laid out on the bed while he unlatches Persephone’s suitcase. “Her nightie’s rolled up in there with my stockings,” she tells him, then, “You will be visiting. I ain’t having her forget your face before next fall.”

“She can’t tell me from your mother yet.”

“Yet.” She lowers herself, carefully, to the edge of the bed. Persephone traces her finger across their daughter’s tiny, clenched fist, watching it slowly unfold like a flower. She watches Hades, his white head bent over her, his fingers busied with unpinning her diaper. “I should have given you more than three months.”

His head lifts. “After the boy,” says Hades. “After what I did to the girl—” he shrugs. “I didn’t deserve it.”

“No more than I did,” Persephone tells him. She remembers the first signs, the slow blossoming of it through the spring and wants to laugh: how could she’ve figured her courses had stopped, her who’s destined to forever be a selfish girl? She watches Hades, watches him like she did on the train in the first days of fall, sees all over again the anger and the helplessness in the face of a future tipped upside-down. Sees acceptance, a flash of what might be forgiveness, and tries with all her might to show she sees, sees and feels the same. “Seems to me deserving something don’t make much difference with what you get.”

“Seems so,” says Hades, and lowers his head.

***

Persephone reaches for him that night. For a while, the first in a long while, Hades folds her up in his embrace. He’s cool, her husband, cool as the hard winter earth, and with a touch of fever still outstaying its welcome in her blood it’s a relief, a welcome, a soft place to land. “Songbird,” he calls her, and “lover”—“How long, lover?” he murmurs, kissing Persephone’s warm forehead, her heavy eyes.

She whispers her answer into the curve of his shoulder so as not to wake the baby.

Later, Hades says, “About the name—”

“If it’s Elysia again I don’t want to hear it.”

“Not Elysia.” His voice is dry. “I was looking through some old records—”

“Oh, Lord—”

“Makaria.”

“Makaria,” Persephone repeats after a moment.

“It means—” Hades clears his throat. “According to Hermes it means ‘blessed.’”

“‘Blessed.’ Awful weighty, that.” Persephone gropes for his hand under the covers. Finds it and squeezes it, feeling her husband’s fingers twine through her own. “Weighty ain’t bad, though. Not when it’s mixed in with hope.”

***

Morning brings a tinge of warmth to air otherwise set like crystal. A breath of all-too-early spring fans Persephone’s hair as she walks in her mother’s garden. In the house is the smell of coffee perking up, bacon sizzling in its fat. There’s the sound of Demeter’s voice, and Hades’, and the gurgles of the baby. Outside there’s the call of a northbound wind and not much else.

Persephone walks to the gate. Snow crunching under her gardener’s boots, she fishes Eurydice’s letter out of her pocket. It flutters like a trapped bird as she says, “Ride on this wind, and may you find him. May you find that boy, wherever he is, and may you bring them both peace.” Opening her hand, Persephone releases Eurydice’s words to the wind, a wind about to turn like an old tale, an old song, like the turning of the years over all the earth.

***

“How long?”

Since the world began, and even to its end.

**Author's Note:**

> According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaria), Makaria/Macaria is a Greek goddess mentioned in the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia the _Suda_ ; though her mother’s name isn’t given, Makaria is apparently the daughter of Hades, and the goddess of blessed deaths. Obviously, once I heard that there’s an actual mythological basis for Hades/Persephone babyfic I had to run with it.


End file.
